Restaurant Model: Break-Even Covers, Menu Costing, Startup – Excel XLSX

BENEFITS OF THIS DOWNLOADABLE EXCEL DOCUMENT

1. Break-even expressed as covers per day and tested against seats times table turns, so an impossible plan fails a check instead of showing a healthy revenue figure.
2. Menu costing beside the P&L, with checks that no dish is priced below its ingredient cost and every margin ties to price less cost.
3. Startup costs split into equity and debt with the loan amortised, so the monthly payment appears as the fixed cost it actually is.

RESTAURANT INDUSTRY EXCEL DESCRIPTION

Restaurant Model: Break-Even Covers, Menu Costing, Startup is an Excel template (XLSX) available for immediate download upon purchase.

A restaurant break-even quoted in revenue per month is almost useless at the table. Nobody can tell you whether $14,714 a month is achievable. Twenty-three customers a day against forty seats turning two and a half times – that is a judgement anyone in the business can make in a second. This model converts the break-even into covers per day and then checks that the answer physically fits inside the seating capacity you entered.

The example that ships in the file: 40 seats, 2.5 table turns a day, 26 operating days a month, an average spend of $25 a cover, food cost at 30% of revenue, $6,000 of labour, $2,500 of rent, $900 of utilities, $500 of marketing and $400 of other fixed costs, with tax at 20% on positive EBITDA.

On those numbers: revenue $65,000 a month, fixed costs $10,300, contribution margin $17.50 a cover, break-even 589 covers a month – 22.6 covers a day against a capacity of 100. The startup side totals $87,900, financed 30% equity and $61,530 over 60 months at 8%, a loan payment of $1,247.61 a month.

Three things this model does that comparable restaurant templates do not.

First, the capacity test. The Checks sheet verifies that the break-even covers per day fit inside seats times table turns. If they do not, the plan is not merely tight, it is arithmetically impossible – and that is a failure most spreadsheets will happily report as a healthy-looking break-even revenue figure. This is the single most useful test in the file.

Second, menu costing sits alongside the P&L rather than in a separate document. Five dishes are costed with ingredient cost, selling price, food cost percentage and gross margin, and the checks confirm that every dish's food cost percentage is its ingredient cost over its price, that every gross margin is price less cost, and that no dish is priced below what it costs to make. The shipped menu runs from 24.6% food cost on the dessert to 37.8% on the salmon, which is exactly the spread that tells you where the margin is really coming from.

Third, startup cost and financing are modelled, not just listed. The nine startup lines total to the investment, a down payment percentage splits it into equity and debt, and the monthly loan payment is amortised over the term at the stated rate – with a check that the payment reproduces the financed amount and that equity plus debt equals the total. A business plan that lists startup costs without the resulting monthly payment is missing a fixed cost.

What is inside. Seven sheets. ReadMe with instructions and a colour key. Startup Costs – nine itemised lines by category, the total, the financing split and the amortised monthly payment. Assumptions – seats, table turns, days open, average spend, food cost percentage, labour, rent, utilities, marketing, other fixed costs and the tax rate. P&L – twenty-four months of revenue, food cost, gross profit, each fixed cost line, EBITDA, tax and net profit. Menu Costing – five dishes with food cost percentage and gross margin. Break-Even – fixed costs, contribution margin per cover, break-even covers per month, break-even revenue and break-even covers per day. Checks – seventeen pass/fail tests.

How you know the numbers are right. Seventeen tests run inside the workbook and all seventeen pass in the shipped file, each written in plain English so you can read what is being checked rather than take it on trust. They cover the revenue build, the cost lines in every one of the twenty-four months, the whole break-even chain, the menu costing, the capacity test and the loan amortisation. They stay live, so they will also tell you when your own assumptions stop being internally consistent.

Separately, every output was re-derived in an independent script using different arithmetic, as part of a verification covering this model and three others in the same family – 691 comparisons in all, with no disagreements.

What this model does not do. Revenue is a steady-state build from seats, turns and spend; there is no seasonality curve, no separate lunch and dinner day-parts, no weekday and weekend split, and no ramp-up period for a new opening. Labour is a monthly amount rather than a rota with hours and roles. There is no beverage margin modelled separately from food. If you need a full operating budget with shift-level labour scheduling, this is not that file. If you need to know how many customers a day the place has to serve to survive, whether that fits in the room, and what the startup loan adds to the monthly nut, this answers exactly that.

Source: Best Practices in Restaurant Industry, Integrated Financial Model Excel: Restaurant Model: Break-Even Covers, Menu Costing, Startup Excel (XLSX) Spreadsheet, Paweł Dudek, Balancewright